As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the community must remain proactive and vigilant to flatten the curve and slow the spread. CSU Bakersfield’s administrators and community members held a meeting on Sept. 27 to address the future of on-campus learning. The meeting consisted of CSUB’s Associated Student, Inc, CSUB President Lynnette Zelezny, the CSUB Pandemic Planning Team, and Brynn Carrigan, Kern County Public Health Assistant Director, about the future of Kern County, Covid-19, and CSUB’s on-campus learning.  

Like many colleges and campuses across the nation, CSUB has limited the amount students and faculty are on campus to slow the spread of COVID-19 and keep its students safe. While the campus community has been striving towards preventing the spread of Covid-19 vigilance must be practiced so that we can one day return to campus. President Zelezny asks students to remain vigilant and practice personal responsibility in frequently washing hands, wearing a mask, social distancing and getting tested as needed.  

“Our top priority here at CSUB is always safety and health… to ensure the safety and by extension the safety our families and communities,” Zelezny said. 

 Vanessa Chicaiza, CSUB’s ASI President, asks the students of CSUB to keep a few things in mind as the global community strives towards ending the COVID-19 pandemic.  

 “Continue to practice social distancing, to continue to please where your mask and to continue to practice good hygiene,” Chicaiza said.  

While the campus community continues to practice good health and safety measures,  the campus community must remember that the typical college student plays a pivotal role in the fight against COVID-19. 

“By age groups nationwide, college-age, 19 to 43 years old comprise 23.3 percent of all COVID cases in the United States. Which is the largest proportion of any age group; it exceeds all other age groups within the cases nationwide,” Carrigan said. 

Carrigan explains that college students may be the largest population with COVID-19, the most at risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19 is students’ parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents. Also, many of the CSUB on-campus professors fall in the demographics for being more at risk in contracting COVID-19.  

“In California, that age group, 18 to 49, is 60 percent of the cases,” Carrigan stated.  

Carrigan’s real concern about the college community contracting the virus and then taking it home during holiday breaks. 

“There is a real risk in the younger people in our college-age people bringing this illness home and giving it to older relatives who are at higher risk for severe illness,” Carrigan said.